


I have the ocean's soul

by la_muerta



Series: Shadowhunter Bingo entries [6]
Category: Shadowhunters (TV)
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, F/F, Mermaid Isabelle Lightwood, Minor Character Death, Shadowhunter Bingo 2019, mermaid au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-06
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:54:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,318
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23513464
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/la_muerta/pseuds/la_muerta
Summary: While out "fishing" (avoiding her brother) on a warm summer's day, Maia accidentally catches a very odd fish.For the Shadowhunter Bingo Square:Long Distance
Relationships: Isabelle Lightwood/Maia Roberts
Series: Shadowhunter Bingo entries [6]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1570297
Comments: 6
Kudos: 27
Collections: SHBingo





	I have the ocean's soul

Maia is 16 years old when she almost drowns while fishing.

To be fair, she hadn't been paying attention. She'd just had a fight with her horrible brother and needed an excuse to get out of the house to avoid him, so she'd swiped his fishing rod and gone out to the little rocky cove that nobody ever went to, thrown her line into the water with no bait on the hook, and gone to sleep under the shade. 

Nobody ever came to this part of the island. Even on really hot days when all the beaches and lagoons were packed with tourists and locals alike, people steered clear of it. Her mother had warned her to stay away as well, of course, but she was a curious child and hadn't listened, and in all the years of sneaking past the fence nothing bad had happened to her. It was the last few days of the summer holidays, and Maia just wanted to have a few days of lazy peace.

It had all been going pretty well until she’d been woken up in the middle of her nap by the sound of the little bell at the tip of the fishing rod ringing wildly. 

Maia sat up in surprise. She'd wedged the handle of the rod quite firmly between two boulders, and the rod was bent almost in half with the weight of the fish it had caught. Maia wasn't interested in actually getting the fish out of the water but she was very curious about what it might be, and if the rod broke her brother would pinch her black-and-blue, so she hurried towards the rod to steady it. The water in the cove was very deep and usually pretty clear, but whatever she'd accidentally caught was thrashing about so violently that it had stirred up the silt at the bottom, turning the water hopelessly murky. She caught a glimpse of silvery scales, but it wasn't enough for her to identify the type of fish, only that the reflectiveness meant that it wasn't a shark. Maia had only just managed to pull the rod out from between the boulders when the fish yanked sharply on the rod and pulled her into the water. 

Maia barely had the presence of mind to take one last gulp of air before she went under. She should have let go of the fishing rod, but she hadn't been thinking straight, and whatever she'd caught was strong enough to try to drag her to the bottom. All she saw was a very large shape in the murky water, then she hit her head on something and everything went dark.

Maia woke up gradually to find herself lying on the sun-baked rock, flat on her back. For a moment she thought she’d dreamt it, but her head felt sore and her hair and clothes were wet. She sat up with a groan and caught movement out of the corner of her eye - there was a girl who was probably about her age in the water. Maia had never seen her before, but she might have just been a tourist. She was very pretty and had long dark hair, and was watching Maia with an anxious expression on her face, only her head above the water. There was something strange about her eyes that Maia couldn't quite place, and her hands under the surface of the water where she was treading water to stay afloat looked oddly elongated as well. Also, the water was pretty clear so Maia could see that she wasn't wearing a top, although she did seem to be wearing some shimmery silver spandex pants. _Wow_. Swimming topless in the middle of the day took some guts.

“Did you get me out of the water?” Maia asked her.

The girl just stared back. Maia thought she knew what was wrong with her eyes - it appeared that the other girl was wearing cat-eyed contacts to swim, which was a really weird thing to do.

“Oh crap, you don’t speak English. Um… _¿me rescataste?_ "

The girl smiled back uncertainly, still obviously not understanding what Maia was saying. 

“Sorry, that’s all I’ve got,” Maia said. “But since you’re in the water looking at me like that, I’m guessing it was you, so thank you.”

She swung her feet into the water. The girl looked alarmed.

“Sorry, I need to find my fishing rod. My brother will kill me if I lose it,” Maia explained. “Don’t worry, I’ll be careful this time and try not to need rescuing.”

Maia pushed herself off the rock and dropped straight down into the water. She’d been prepared to look away if the other girl was shy about Maia seeing her topless, but the first thing Maia saw was that what she’d taken for spandex pants was actually a fucking huge fishtail. She didn’t get to have a good look at it though, because the other girl immediately spun and swam away, her powerful lashing tail stirring up the silt again and forcing Maia to surface. Maia let out a gasp when she broke to the surface, looking for a sign of the mysterious girl, but there were no ripples on the waves ahead. Maia waited and waited, but she didn’t break to the surface for air.

Deeply unnerved, Maia dove down again when the silt had settled and eventually found her brother’s fishing rod a few feet away. There was a single large silver fish scale impaled on the hook, still a little bloody. Perhaps this was all just a really elaborate prank or Maia had hit her head harder than she thought, but at the moment the only insane, ridiculous thought in her head was that the other girl was quite possibly a mermaid.

\--

There was probably no chance of ever seeing the mermaid again, but Maia started going to the cove even more often after that, always at the same time that she had first seen the mermaid. It might have been her imagination, but once or twice she thought she spotted a dark head in the distance, gone before she could train her binoculars on it for a closer look. She didn’t blame the mermaid for keeping her distance, considering her previous foray near the shore had led to her getting injured by a fishing hook.

But after the first few weeks, she began to see the mermaid more frequently - sometimes a head, sometimes a tail, and always in the distance. It seemed that the mermaid was curious about her too.

One day, Maia saw something in the mall that gave her a brainwave - a waterproof book for babies, to entertain them during bath time. This particular book was titled _Ocean Friends_ , had a mermaid on the cover, and had bright pictures of various sea creatures. She went to the cove a couple of times before she finally spotted the mermaid, and she waved at her, pointed to the book in her hand, then left it on the rock where the mermaid could reach it without coming too far out of the water, and resisted the urge to hang around to see if her gift had been accepted. 

When she checked back half an hour later, the book was gone. In its place, there was a slimy green oval lump about the size of a bottle cap on the rock, still wet, and upon closer look Maia thought she saw a hint of gold under all the muck. She brought it home and scrubbed it clean, to find that the mermaid had given her an antique golden locket.

Maia gave the mermaid a few more bath books, most of them for teaching babies their ABCs and the names of various animals and household items. The mermaid kept giving her shiny things she’d no doubt dug out from some shipwreck, and Maia didn’t know how to tell her it really wasn’t necessary to keep giving her coins, jewellery, and solid gold bars. Maia dropped off most of it anonymously at the local museum where she felt it belonged, but she kept the first locket the mermaid had given her since it was just large enough to keep the pierced mermaid scale, and wore the locket around her neck on a cheap leather cord, safely out of sight under her shirt so her brother wouldn’t try to snatch it from her. It was getting pretty tempting to keep some of that gold though, if not for herself - her brother had taken to stealing from their mom’s meagre savings to buy alcohol and probably drugs, and they were barely meeting their rent payments as it was.

\--

Maia is 17 years old when her mother passes away.

She had just been crossing the road on her way home after work. The driver had been texting while driving. 

After the funeral, Maia had gone to the cove just to be alone, but in a few minutes, she heard footsteps behind her. 

"What are you doing here?" she snarled. "Fuck off."

"Is that the way to talk to your older brother? You're still a minor, so I'm responsible for you now, you know," her brother said, and sat down next to her. 

"That's a fucking joke. You can't even take care of yourself. Just leave me alone," Maia snapped. 

"Sure - after you hand over that little trinket around your neck," he said, and made a grab for it. 

Maia did her best to fight him off, kicking out and punching him, but he was bigger than her and much stronger. He grabbed a fistful of her hair and was about to slam her head against the rocks when he let out a yell surprise and let go of her to clutch his leg, which was now bloody. Then something dragged her brother into the water, and after a long, tense silence, she saw blood blooming in the water and his mangled body floated to the surface. 

"Holy shit," she breathed. Half his face was gone - it looked like he'd been mauled by a wild animal. 

A dark head emerged from the water, and Maria's breath caught in her throat. The mermaid's face was mostly clean of blood now but she looked even more beautiful than Maia remembered. The mermaid wore shells and pearls in her hair, and up close Maia could see scattered markings of silvery scales on her cheekbones, shoulders, and chest, catching the afternoon light. There were several deep, horrific-looking dark pink gashes on both sides of her neck, and for a moment Maia was worried that her brother had injured the mermaid, until she realised that they were gills. The mermaid looked uncertain of her welcome, but relaxed when Maia smiled at her. 

"That's the second time you've saved my life. Thank you," Maia said softly. 

The mermaid cocked her head and let out a series of chirps and clicks, not unlike the sounds made by dolphins, and after a beat, both of them started laughing. 

“Ok, I guess this is going to take some work,” Maia said, wiping tears from her eyes, then the full weight of what had just happened crashed down on her. She had no other living relatives and her brother’s body was floating just a few feet away. Was anyone going to believe her if she said she had nothing to do with it? 

Maia covered her face with one shaky hand, trying not to have a panic attack, and startled when she felt a hand on her knee. The mermaid’s hand was clearly not a human hand; there was a thin webbing between her clawed fingers that went up to the second knuckle and scattering of silvery scales on the back of her hand, but it was warm and gentle.

“What am I going to do?” Maia whispered. The mermaid hesitated, then reached out to cup Maia’s face. Maia found herself leaning forward, mesmerised, and their lips touched moments before the mermaid pulled her under the water with her.

Maia gasped. Pain shot through her neck but suddenly she was no longer struggling to breathe. Maia stilled, trying to get used to the strange sensation of breathing underwater and touched the side of her neck gingerly. Apparently, kissing a mermaid gave you gills.

The mermaid smiled at her and held out her hand. Maia took it without hesitation.

_Take me away from here. Anywhere but here._

Hand in hand, they began to swim out to the open sea.

-

First, Maia got herself an American passport under a new last name, then a beach house in California, and a place in the university studying marine biology. Solid gold bars could buy a lot of things.

The gills sealed up when she was out of the water and just looked like scars, but Maia tried to wear scarves and high-collars whenever possible so people wouldn’t ask awkward questions. On the second day of the semester, someone paid for her coffee and tried to get her number.

“Sorry, I’m already in a relationship,” she told him.

“Oh. I mean, yeah, that’s no surprise,” he said, scratching the back of his head in embarrassment.

“I could always use a friend, though,” she said. He seemed sweet.

“Yeah? Yeah, that’s cool too,” he said. “I’m Simon.”

“I’m Maia. Are you from around here?”

“No, I’m from New York. Brooklyn, actually,” Simon replied. “Does your boyfriend go to school here too?”

“No, my girlfriend Isabelle lives quite a distance away.”

“Sorry, girlfriend, right,” Simon said. “Where does she live?”

“Atlanta,” Maia said, smiling at her own little joke. 

“Uh, that’s in Georgia, right? The other side of the country,” Simon said, letting out a low whistle. “Long-distance relationships are tough, kudos to you two for making it work." 

"I get to see her quite often, so it’s ok,” Maia told him. After all, the ocean had many shores.


End file.
